Historically, television services have been comprised of analog broadcast audio and video signals. Cable television systems now receive broadcasts and retransmit them with other programming to users over land-line networks, typically comprising fiber optic cable and coaxial cable. With the recent advent of digital transmission technology, cable television systems are now capable of providing much more than the traditional analog broadcast video. For instance, two-way and advanced one-way communications between a subscriber and a cable system headend are now possible.
In implementing enhanced programming, the home communication terminal, otherwise known as the set-top box, has become an important computing device for accessing video services and navigating a subscriber through a maze of available services. In addition to supporting traditional analog broadcast video functionality, digital set-top boxes now also support an increasing number of services which are digital two-way communications, such as video-on-demand, email and web-browsing. These are all in addition to the host of other television services which are increasingly being demanded by consumers, examples of which include audio and audio/visual programming, advanced navigation controls, impulse pay-per-view technology, and on-line commerce.
With the addition of interactive services, increased bandwidth and the emergence of bi-directional communication capabilities available through a digital television system, there is a need to provide a standard method of distributing and providing a wide variety of services and content from multiple content and service providers. This allows content to be easily distributed which enables a greater variety of content to be made available to subscribers. Currently, content such as a movie is provided to cable operators by content providers via a tape or digital transfer. To broadcast the movie to one or more viewers the cable operators must manually input data associated with the movie, such as the movie title, actors and actresses, date filmed, and like data. Furthermore, to provide a service such as a Movie-On-Demand (MOD) service, the format for receiving content must be pre-established such that any content retrieved electronically can be understood by the system. Where services are added, each service requires that the cable operators create an application specifically for the service, which is time-consuming and results in edits to system software that was created without the service in mind.
Therefore, what is needed are systems and methods for standardizing the electronic and digital transmission, reception, distribution and management of content and services in a cable system.